Bewilderingly Complicated Music to Melt Your Tiny Mind

The new Modeselektor album is out this week, and if you’re into cerebral electronica, well, it’s going to nestle happily alongside the likes of Squarepusher and Autechre in your music collection. There’s something to be said for music that’s bewildering at first listen, but reveals its charms over the course of repeated listens — music you have to work at, in other words. Although it’s electronic music that seems to have had nerdbait locked up in recent years, thanks to the advent of “intelligent” dance music and the efforts of labels like Warp, highbrow music pre-dates synths and DAWs by a long way. If you’re up for a challenge, there’s a selection of similarly mind-bending music awaiting you after the jump. Turn on, tune in, and see if your brain doesn’t just melt.

Autechre

We might as well start with the band who — along with Warp contemporaries like Squarepusher — kinda embody the whole idea of IDM, and who amuse themselves by doing things like programming drum patterns such as the one above. There was a picture doing the rounds a while back of a patch that Autechre programmed on Max, before it got wrapped up into Ableton as Max for Live. If you’re interested, you can see it here — do let us know if you can make any sense of it.